Neuros very kindly sent over a sample of their MPEG-4 Recorder 2 set-top units, and I've been putting it through its paces. Essentially it's a tiny gadget designed to record video directly onto your smartphone's expansion card, for playback on the move. Here's the full review.
Read on in the full article.
I am using a Kiss DVD recorder with an Ethernet interface, FTP server and obviously an harddrive.
It comes with access to the 'European Program Guide' which you can access from your phone, a PC or the DVD player menu itself. Here you can view the schedule for the various cable channels and schedule recordings.
After recording a program, it is a matter of FTP'ing the file to my PC and dragging it to SmartMovie.
Perhaps a few steps more than the device you reviewed, but very flexible, as you can install codes and chose formats on the encoding PC as needed.
Regards,
Michael
File type brand problem? Not sure if this is related to the mp4 playback problem in S60 3rd phones mentioned in your article. I've been converting clips to mp4 using ffmpeg for a while and found out that ffmpeg produces mp4 file with file type brand isom instead of mp41 or mp42 (perhaps I was using the outdated ffmpeg in this case). The mp4 files work fine in UIQ3 phone (M600i), but not recognised by RealPlayer in S60 3rd phones (3250/N71). Only after changing couple bytes in mp4 header (using hex editor) from
...ftypisommp41�r�mdat�...
to
...ftypmp41mp41.t�mdat�...
then the same files become recognised and playable in S60 3rd RealPlayer.